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Oxford. "Oxford was ... no place for the stupid young man on the make, who was ignored, nor for the man chary of brain in the larger interest—he was despised." At Oxford Rice had as fellow students Christopher Morley (New College) and Elmer Davis (Queens). Davis, says Rice, was "the one brilliant man in Queens . . . the most erudite American at Oxford."
Nebraska. Professor Rice and the University of Nebraska were incompatible from the start. He became a great and cynical crony of Chancellor Sam Avery, who "had a nose like the neck of a whiskey bottle" rounding to a golf-ball tip, and ran the university with the hardheaded shrewdness of a county political boss. But Rice found the university politics-ridden, full of "incompetents, misfits, the intellectually lazy, and trash." One day Sam Avery exclaimed in exasperation: "Why don't you keep your mouth shut, Rice? If you would just keep it shut for, say, six months or a year, I could raise your salary." He never got the raise.
Rollins. Professor Rice had been banished to the showy fringe of U.S. education by the time he arrived at Rollins. There he found a class in "Evil," a Professor of Fishing and Hunting and a pink-spotlighted chapel Christmas service which he promptly attacked as "obscene." The college solemnly called its faculty members "Golden Personalities"—in public. "There is something essentially adolescent," observes Rice, "about college doings." He proceeded to make life miserable for Rollins' skittery President Hamilton Holt. With obvious relish, Professor Rice relates how he was finally removed, like Socrates, on grounds of corrupting youth.
Black Mountain. In this mood of disillusionment and martyrdom Rice and his fellow Rollins refugees founded their own college in 1933. The new college was to be an experiment in pure democracy, 24-hour-a-day "education of the whole man by a whole man." But Black Mountain, says Rice, "was born on the wrong side of the blanket. ..."
Individualist Rice soon began to find even his fellow experimenters too conventional, rowed bitterly with them. "I began to see, but slowly and with reluctance," he concludes, "that I must live apart from people, for their good and mine. A teacher should bring peace." Since his departure, Black Mountain has been more peaceful.
If he had his life to live over again, Professor Rice says that he would "choose the 18th Century for its violence, yet touched with grace . . . for its child's world for children; for its passionate belief that the world would be better, perhaps tomorrow. . . ."